Dave Haynie is a name well known to any die hard Amigan. In those circles he easily qualifies for the title of living legend. His fame is partly due to the fact that he was one of the most brilliant engineers ever to be employed at Commodore, but also because he happened to be one of the most outspoken ones on any public forum, both when it came to technical matters about Amiga software and hardware, but also on matters of Commodore policy. Also known for filming and producing The Deathbed Vigil video which documented the sad shutdown of Commodore's West Chester facilities, and the breakup of the legendary engineering team who were scattered to the four winds. This video is now a collectors item among devoted Amiga fans. (I own a copy :)

Dave was employed at Commodore from late 1983 through mid-1994 when the company went bankrupt. His job was Senior Hardware/Systems Engineer.

Amongst his credits at Commodore were:

  • 1983: Commodore "TED" project, low-cost VIC-20 replacement computer.
  • 1984: Commodore 128 project, the sequel to the venerable Commodore 64.
  • 1986: Amiga 2000, the first high-end, slot-based Amiga. He designed a gate array and the architecture for a simple CPU card expansion.
  • 1988: Amiga 2620/2630: 68020/30 processor cards for the Amiga 2000.
  • 1989: Amiga 3000. First fully 32-bit Amiga architecture. As a co-creator of the system, he designed the basic system architecture, the Zorro III expansion bus standard, and the "Buster" bus control gate array which implemented Zorro III.
  • 1991: Amiga 3000+": initially a product oriented design, this coupled the new Amiga "AA" system/graphics chipset, an AT&T DSP3210 media coprocessor, 16-bit audio and modem CODECs, etc. Management changes canceled the project, though some of the designs was incorperated into the Amiga 4000 and 1200.
  • 1992: Developed 32-bit SCSI controller for Amiga 4000, architecture for stand-alone DSP add-in cards, and prototype of "AAA" motherboard, for Commodore's 4th generation, 64-bit Amiga graphics system. Unfortunately by the end of 1993, there is no money left to fix any of the bugs in the four full-custom ASICs.
  • 1994: Developed plug-in graphics subsystem for the Amiga. Commodore declares bankruptcy, this is never built.

Dave is the author of DiskSalv. The disk recovery program to end all Amiga disk recovery programs, in particular the dreaded Disk Doctor which was the AmigaOS recommended utility for salvaging data from corrupt floppy disks. A popular switch on the AmigaOS error message was, "Use Disk Doctor to corrupt disk in df0:".

The list of computer systems, operating systems, processors, software suits and programming environments with which Dave Haynie is proficient is just endless.

Dave has a wife named to Elizabeth, and they have children Sean (who appeared in Deathbed Vigil) and Kira. In any spare time he has you could find him messing around with Audio/video studio production, Aikido (he's a black belt iirc) and beer making to name a few.
His family has a 26.3 acre tree farm in South Jersey. In the celler there is an office, electronics lab, and sound studio.

The next time you have your Amiga open, look for Dave's name etched on its motherboard!

"You're lucky if you can find even one thing in a
lifetime that inspires you to push beyond the
accepted, to fight the established, to run the
razor's edge and discover your limits are only
what you make them. But if you ever do find
such a thing, dig your teeth into that sucker like
you're a pit bull and hang on as long as you can."

- Dave Haynie


Postscript:
Why is this node linked to Margarita? Well.. A couple of reasons. It happens to be one of Dave's favorite drinks. But also Margarita's Evergreen Inn, which was just down the road from Commodore's West Chester facilities, was the preferred party place of the Commodore engineering crowd. It also hosted the traditional lay-off dinners, but that should be the subject of an entirely different writeup alltogether.